For the green-lighting of the Empire State Building in honor of Eid, that is.
This semi-facetious characterization comes from Schlussel herself, who explains: Ten years ago, her nine-year-old cousin Mallory (this is a female name) wrote a letter asking that the Empire State Building be lit up in honor of Hannukah. Her request was granted in a highly publicized fashion. But as Schlussel points out, this pushing of a relatively minor Jewish holiday which happens to fall at about the same time as Christmas, and doing so for purely egalitarian reasons, furthered the notion that everyone is "entitled" to public religious holiday recognition. And now, of course, we have what Schlussel aptly calls "the religion of hijackers" honored by the lighting up of New York City's tallest (surviving) building, in the same egalitarian vein.
This sort of problem was foreseen by Schlussel's own late father, at a time when everyone else in the family was thrilled by young Mallory's fame. Good for him. Sometimes father does know best.
HT LGF
Comments (8)
...the green-lighting of the Empire State Building in honor of Eid...
That is ... amazing. Lighting up the tallest remaining building in NYC in honor of the religion of the 9-11 hijackers. If that isn't the ultimate statement of the liberal belief that religion can't ever be allowed to matter, I don't know what is.
Posted by Zippy | October 13, 2007 12:27 PM
Don't tell me you heard it here first?
Gee, I'm actually getting information out. This is cool. :-)
Posted by Lydia | October 13, 2007 4:19 PM
Actually, I saw it on TV first. I thought of emailing you, but decided to wait to see if you'd pick up on it. Guess what.
It's hard to put into words how knowledge of the event makes me feel. So I won't try, since the only words on the tip of my tongue should not be uttered in a lady's presence.
Posted by William Luse | October 13, 2007 4:54 PM
Don't tell me you heard it here first?
OK, I won't tell you that, which means I can't tell you where I heard it first.
Posted by Zippy | October 13, 2007 6:12 PM
I guess you weren't trolling (or is that "trawling"?) the same web sites I was this past week, Zippy.
I think it is kind of an interesting question whether the promotion of Hannukah has contributed to this "everybody's gotta have a holiday" attitude.
I'm rather inclined to think that historically this is correct. It's pretty obvious that Hannukah was pushed into special prominence in the United States to be a competitor to Christmas. Various conservative Jewish pundits have pointed this out. And I don't know about you guys, but I can vaguely remember its happening, even though I was rather young and unobservant at the time. But it seems to me somewhere in the mid-70's one started hearing on the news or in commercials and stuff (I watched a ton of TV then as a kid) people saying, "Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah" where just a little while before it had just been "Merry Christmas." And at around the same time, I seem to recall, public figures went from referring to "Christian values" to "Judeo-Christian values."
Now as to the second of these, I really wouldn't mind it in and of itself. Because I'm the first person to say loudly that the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is unique and isn't like the relationship between Christianity and any other religion in the world. There really are such things as "Judeo-Christian values," which come from the one true God.
But the trouble was that these changes seemed vaguely to me at the time, and even more so in hindsight, to have been politically motivated. They were one small aspect of that era's PC-speak, along with (to give another 70's-to-80's example) the every-few-years changes in what we were told we must call black people.
And the vague idea behind those careful inclusions of references to Jewish holidays and the like was that Christianity wasn't such a big deal in America, historically or culturally, that it was bad manners to imply that it is, and that there should be this sort of ever-widening circle of cultural inclusiveness as far as giving positive credit for our values to a religion or giving explicit recognition in our holiday wishes, etc., to a religion.
And once you get that sort of attitude started, it's hard to draw the line.
A year and a half ago there was a rather infamous ruckus over on Right Reason, though the entire thread has now been quietly deleted: A contributor innocently put up a post with the heading "Happy Easter." The previous Christmas I had had a post with the header "Merry Christmas." No one had said anything about mine, but when the "Happy Easter" post went up (followed by a wholly innocuous reference to the Pope's Easter sermon), a rather pushy commentator began more or less *demanding* that any contributor who said such a thing should always wish any Jewish readers that might hypothetically be in his audience a Happy Passover. Was Right Reason a Christian site, or what? He'd noticed these sorts of holiday greetings before. What was going on? And so forth. It was exceedingly silly, but he was quite serious, and he did a nice little riff on how terribly "intimidating" it is to be Jewish in such a very Christian country as the United States, how Christians are obligated by noblesse oblige to go out of their way (presumably by Affirmative Action in holiday references such as he had suggested) to make sure Jews don't feel this way, etc.
I think that sort of bullying is rather the sort of thing Schlussel has in mind and is _very much_ in line with the Eid green-lighting: Americans have an obligation to reach out to The Other, to make sure nobody Feels Left Out, and so on and so forth.
Posted by Lydia | October 13, 2007 7:14 PM
Lydia,
I didn't know the thread had been deleted over at RR. That's a shame, because there were a lot of silly caricatures made by both sides. I remember there was a commentator who started questioning the Holocaust. After that nonsense, the whole thread became a flame war. It was nuts.
Posted by Step2 | October 14, 2007 1:58 PM
Gee, I was in on that every step of the way and remember not one single Holocaust questioner. But my point was to refer to the _beginning_ of the whole thing in the exceedingly pushy complaint from the one fellow (whose name I have genuinely forgotten) that someone had dared to post "Happy Easter" without "Happy Passover." That is just ridiculous and childish, and it is really part and parcel of this multi-culti concept that somehow we're harming someone or having bad manners if we aren't listing and recognizing a variety of religious holidays.
Posted by Lydia | October 14, 2007 2:21 PM
Lydia,
I agree that he was being pushy. At the same time he did seem genuinely, if wrongly, concerned that the greetings were not intended as acts of goodwill. Unfortunately, the comment thread showed that among a few of the readers, the holidays are an occasion for condemning instead of blessing.
Posted by Step2 | October 14, 2007 8:05 PM